Category Archives: Day-in-the-life

1-2: doing some web content updating. We’re THIS CLOSE to implementing the real live working workflow for our public site, but until that happens, I’m the only one from the Biomedical library who can edit our site. It’s, uh, irksome. For everyone. Especially people who need things done quickly because frankly I’ve been quite a bottleneck in this process. Sorry, folks. 😦

2-3: ref desk. Actually, service desk. Biomed has a combined ref/circ desk, and today I would estimate 60% of my traffic was circ, mostly course reserve stuff. But there were two real research help questions and one consumer health question. The latter is a person I’ve talked to before, who really really really needs to talk to a doctor but doesn’t seem to want to, for whatever reason. I don’t know if they’re scared, don’t have health coverage, or what. But they keep pushing for actual medical advice, what should I do, what specific treatments, is this for sure not contagious… advice we absolutely cannot give.

10-11:30am: training for editors of the Libraries’ new Intranet, using the content management system we also use for our public website. (We use Hannon Hill’s Cascade Server for those keeping track.) I’ve been an editor on the public side since we started using it, but we’re just getting going migrating the Intranet into it. So I already knew the mechanics of the system, but needed to get the structure and navigation elements. I mayyyy have done a little tweeting on the side… and I mayyyy also have made a test page in the training playground that represented my department with a limerick. Yay training pages nobody sees.

11:30-12 – trying to figure 0ut how someone managed to put a page into the CMS that stripped out ALL the style sheet information. Amazing feat of copying and pasting bad luck.

Then onto lunch, wherein I battle the student hordes at the food court. En garde!

9:15 fall down Internet rabbit hole checking out a biological data company that a Twitter friend just started working for. Sounds cool! I can’t say I try to really stay on top of data stuff because that would be a full time job, but this guy’s always on top of leading-edge stuff and is one of the “luminaries” I like to keep tabs on.

9:35 called out to desk to talk to a local unemployed librarian who wanted to do volunteer work at our library. Unfortunately we don’t have any projects that would be suitable at the moment at Biomed but we’ll forward her resume around to the other libraries on campus.
BUMMER.

Hi anyone who’s reading this from the Library Day in the Life project. I work at the Biomedical Library at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). We serve the schools of medicine and pharmacy as well as the biology division. We have about 25 staff including nine librarians. We also have a “branch” at the hospital that has another four staff including two librarians. The UCSD libraries have a big centralized IT department that deals with all the big systems, and my job is to provide local tech leadership – I supervise our desktop support and Information Commons operations and try to at least keep a handle on our participation in digital library projects. Heh. I coordinate our public web presences and also do reference and teach workshops. I’ve been here 13 years.